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Narcissus writes to tell us that the European Parliament is planning a vote in the Industry, Transport, Energy (ITRE) committee that could reintroduce amendment 138 (currently amendment 46) which deals with safeguards to user rights on the internet and graduated response schemes. There are several online campaigns trying to drive awareness and action already but there is limited time to act. "The Council may propose a compromise version of amendment 138/46 that is completely neutralized, or that may even become the opposite of the original by allowing the 'three strikes' scheme instead of preventing it. According to the latest negotiations, am.138/46 wouldn't anymore be an article (that must be transposed by Member States in their law) but a mere recital that has just indicative value. It is urgent to contact the members of the ITRE committee to advise them to reject compromise with the Council that failed to respect the intent of the original amendment. The best would be once again to approve the amendment."

Call back later? Wrong answer. Once the amendment's passed, it's too late to call your representative. We Americans have discovered this from personal experience wherein today's proposal suddenly passes the Congress tomorrow, and now we're stuck with the law. Too late to whine after it's a done deal.

Generally speaking its best to raise awareness of an important vote before it happens, so that you can contact your representatives and make it clear what you expect them to do. You know, so that your representatives actually represent you. Believe it or not democracy doesn't have to happen with elected officials doing what they want while you mutter under your breath, you are allowed as a citizen to actually participate in the process by making your opinions clear to those people who make the vote.

For all the Dutch people here (part of the EU), mail this to the NOS News at nosbinnenland@nos.nl to send your press tips and raise awareness.

The NOS news has been reporting on censorship last week with that local newspaper... I am sure some of you will remember, so they will express interest in this too.

Hint at the Australian censorship as to why 'child-porn' blocking went instantly into censorship of Wikileaks and Wikipedia among other legitimate websites. You can alos find that block-list on Wikileaks.

If more people than just me tip them about it via email then I am sure they will air it tommorow!

Don't think that some one else will already do that beauce usualy no-one does because they think "ah a lot of people will read this so I don't have to"!

And if they don't get what they initially wanted, they'll try another law, and if that doesn't go through, they'll try another law... Until they finally manage to come up with the perfect timing when nobody is paying attention and it goes through.

That or they'll just declare that it's in effect, they can get away with that more and more these days. It's not like voting them out would change anything.

As long as carriers can set their own policies for traffic carried across networks that they own, Net Neutrality is a dead topic.

Free Enterprise dictates that the carriers have the right to price services according to market demand. If your carrier starts adopting tiered pricing or starts prioritizing your traffic in ways that it sees fit, then let your feet do the walking to another carrier.

Free Markets do eventually work their way around to providing the services people want for the price they're willing to pay.

Voting with your feet assumes that the market is healthy enough to have other carriers that don't practice the exact same thing you're trying to get away from. I'm not in Europe, so the outcome of this does not DIRECTLY affect me. I just like playing devil's advocate some days.

I have at least 3 hard-wired choices to my home, both high speed. There's at least 4 3G wireless carriers I can deal with so I think I do have some choice at least where I'm at, so YMMV. I do agree that there needs to be a healthy market though but why then do we in the US give monopolies to companies that just run cables to your house or buy a set of frequencies? To give them incentives to build out the infrastructure. I believe that that system needs to change a bit and only allow them full monopoly power over that investment for a certain period of time.

If you look at Time Warner's recent "Tiered" evaluation flop you can see that people can and do influence these decisions as well.

I have Cable, Fiber and Twisted Pair all going across my "Easement" on my land. The Easement was granted in my Deed to the City so yes there's a civic responsibility to allow for valid utility concerns to use that Easement to provide services for the community. That doesn't however prohibit multiple companies from putting in their own cabling infrastructure just becase somebody else did it already. The providers have paid the city, paid the contractors and bought the cable and fiber. They own that infra

Yeah, because free markets did such a good job with the banking industry.

The rational equilibrium model of the free market fundamentalists has gone tits up. Move on, and wise up. Collusion, misinformation, and group think are quite capable of doing for the IT sector what they have done for the financial sector.

There needs to be citizen participation in both politics and economics. Economies are not worthwhile aims in themselves, they are merely tools we use to coordinate society - whenever they don't work for people, we should seek to change them.

>>>Yeah, because free markets did such a good job with the banking industry.

Not a free market. It's controlled by the *monopoly* called the Reserve Bank, which is itself controlled by the Congress, which mandated in the mid-1990s that banks must hand-out "no money down" loans. That eventually led to the housing crisis. That is not a free market. That's an oligarchy of 535 men.

A true free market would not have a Reserve Bank setting interest rates, but instead have interest rates that are set by each independent bank, and these rates would move up-and-down with supply-and-demand. Furthermore Congress would allow banks to decide for themselves who qualifies and who does not qualify for loans, based on income.

> which mandated in the mid-1990s that banks must hand-out "no money down" loans.

Care to back this up?Also, that is a theory, which is totally new to me. And frankly, even assuming that might be the case, I fail to see how "no money down" loans can lead to the sub-prime crisis.The canonical explanation which blames bad risk assessment (banks, rating agencies) seems much more plausible to me.

> A true free market would not have a Reserve Bank setting interest rates,[...]

>>>The Fed is only setting the interest rate at which banks can borrow from other banks. Your interest rate and that of mortgages are decided by your bank in competition with other banks.

And those rates are typically tied to the Fed rates. In fact my credit card contract states, "Federal Reserve Prime Rate + 10.9%". I don't have a mortgage but if I did, I'm sure it would have a similar clause if it was the variable-type mortgage. That's not a free market, but a controlled market where the centra

The wikipedia article on CRA [wikipedia.org] shows no sign of a requirement of "No money down" loans. It also states, that only certain banks were regulated by the CRA, and interestingly:

2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower.

While correlation may not be causation, no correlation is a fairly good indicator for no causation.

And it also sounds more plausible to most economists - it just sounds implausible to rabid libertarians and neoliberals who are emotionally invested in the idea of perfect markets. To them, the idea that markets are not the ideal means to communicate economic information (the risk of a loan being defaulted, for example) is quite literally a heresy.

No libertarian thinks the market is purpose...er, perfect. They simply think it's better than the alternative of government control. Like the current crisis where the government is artificially propping-up bad businesses. That is the wrong approach, and the proper approach is to let those businesses go bankrupt, and then the pieces can be sold off to healthier businesses.

The free market is basically natural selection in action - yes there are hard times and yes some organisms/ businesses don't survive, b

your idea is completely broken because under your idea a bank could make known bad loans and barrow on margin (thats what fractional reserve banking is all about) from other banks in a circle until then all go down at once and the CEOs take the cash. This is basically what happened.

The problem with zero regulation is that it creates a boom and bust cycle where the banks repeatedly give you a lolli-pop and then slam a pineapple up your ass. And zero regulation is impossible with a modern system, it will alwa

>>>The US has had a boom and bust cycle of every 20 years until the great depression.

And after. The Depression ended sometime around 1951-52, and then we had a boom that lasted twenty years until the 1970s bust... then we had another boom starting in 1981 that lasted until 1999 which is another twenty plus-or-minus a few years. You miscategorize the situation if you think the cycle stopped.

As for the rest of your post, it's confusing what point you were trying to make, but you appear to be under

A true free market would not have a Reserve Bank setting interest rates, but instead have interest rates that are set by each independent bank, and these rates would move up-and-down with supply-and-demand.

Historically that has always resulted in bank failures and bank runs and the loss of the savings of many thrifty people.

Without some regulation, either through malice or incompetence, a bank is going to screw its customers out of their money because someone thought they could take a risk they could not (l

So what you're implying is that if I make an investment to provide services to you I shouldn't have domain over the Ts&Cs? If that's the case then I won't make the investment and let the government build out that infrastructure.

If I see a market that I can provide value to and make a profit then I'll invest in that market. Whether that's Internet Services or Widgets. If there's no possibility for profit or fear for over-regulation and minimalization of my investment then I can find other alternatives

So what you're implying is that if I make an investment to provide services to you I shouldn't have domain over the Ts&Cs? If that's the case then I won't make the investment and let the government build out that infrastructure.

You're forgetting the billions given to you on the agreement that you'd build out the infrastructure in the first place. Conveniently forgetting.

Apparently it's socialism only when money flows to someone who isn't you.

What you say is true, but there is an overall flaw in this slashdot topic.

There is a big difference between a 'threat to net neutrality' and an approach to dealing with 'graduated response' to ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES.

Net Neutrality doesn't mean its ok to pirate software and music - it means that you will have open access to information. This is akin to freedom, wherein you can own knives, guns, ropes, and poisons, but you are still responsible for legal acts you might do with them. It isn't a loss of freedom

What if NAMBLA had an opinion about making love to young boys but started molesting them before they made the act legal? They would be convicted and restricted.

I think copyrights are at the discretion of the owner. If an owner wants to capitalize on a product instead of share it freely in culture, it is theirs and they, as I believe, have that right to restrict. I am sure in you're capable of understanding where an artist may want to control the use of their work.

But at what point are you becoming a criminal? Is it going to be illegal in the future to even criticize your government? That happens in Australia... you'll just be getting banned. No, not you, but your website(!). You'll still be able to check it out, but no-one else will be able to so you're not even beinbg informed! That's scary...

By the way, I am so glad people still make normal hip-hop instead of "Fsck those b*tches yo, n shit" gangster-(c)rap. God I hate that! And what most artists still don't unders

You make a really good point about the abuse of the system and draconian politic. I agree that such abuses should not be allowed. Are the Australians too sated to do whats right for themselves and revolt? Maybe as a whole they are still too free and happy to truly care. I have noticed that in our world absent of ideals, masses are quite satisfied with the best piece of shit they can find. In this case the Australians are probably more glad not to be a somalian resorting to piracy.

I don't agree with how the RIAA operate, nor many of the ways they do their work. But the RIAA doesn't just make a judgement; they are required to go through the same legal processes that any other legal representative of a victim must go through. Furthermore, conviction requires the RIAA to compel the court with sufficient evidence.

Fortunately their shady methods have been brought to light so they will definitely need much more solid evidence before a court.

Free Markets do eventually work their way around to providing the services people want for the price they're willing to pay.
Yes and in the intervening centuries the people are stuck with state-sanctioned monopolies.
Good thing we don't live now.

URGENT: Two days to help Catherine Trautmann protect EU citizens.Paris, April 20th 2009 - The Council of the EU is strongly pushing Catherine Trautmann - rapporteur of the main directives of the "Telecoms Package" - to accept a useless, neutralized version[1] of amendment 138. This amendment, opposing to "graduated response - or "three strikes" â" schemes, has been overwhelmingly adopted by the European Parliament in its first reading on September 2008, and is crucial for safeguarding EU citizens' rights and freedoms. La Quadrature du Net calls European citizens to urge their MEPs seating in ITRE committee to support the rapporteur by refusing any compromise neutralizing amendment 138 (now renumbered 46) on April 21st vote.

[1] The Council wants to make it a merely indicative recital instead of an article that Member States must transpose into their law

Meh... only bad form on bulletin boards which have an "edit post" feature. Slashdot decided not to allow editing of posts (most likely because it would be too powerful of a tool for trolls) so it's all good here.

Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) committee Members contact details (Including emails), by country: http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MEPs_ITRE [laquadrature.net] Two clicks and a quick email/phone call to "urge [your] MEPs seating in ITRE committee to support the rapporteur by refusing any compromise neutralizing amendment 138 (now renumbered 46) on April 21st vote.".

(Thanks to Shawb for pointing out it is not bad form to reply to own post:)

It's about free speech, which even for you should weigh heavier than your job, the inflation and the safety of your family.

What if you get abused by your employer but are unable to say anything about it, or even warn others from accepting positions there? What if the government imprisons your family but you are unable to voice your protest?

Nothing weighs heavier than free speech and freedom of expression. Internet should be a free, uncensored, unmonitored channel of communication that adheres to no rules.

It's nothing to do with free speech at all and everything to do with a bunch of juvenile freeloaders wanting to continue their rampant criminality without recourse so don't go trying to dress it up like it is. The internet can be controlled extremely easily and if it can't, it shows just how little you know about the back end.

It's nothing to do with free speech at all and everything to do with a bunch of juvenile freeloaders wanting to continue their rampant criminality without recourse so don't go trying to dress it up like it is.

Once again, from your ideas, opinions, statements and everybody elses, wheter for or against the issues we have and face, I can conclude that western civilisation, capitalism and governments are the least worse form of human society.

Are they? The least worse type? I disagree. The Athenian Democracy killed itself through foolish decisions made by the demos (the people). Are the modern Euro-American democracies heading down the same path, a ship of state led by the ignorant masses? Furthermore is democracy truly "liberty" or is it just another form of tyranny wherein the larger 51% squash the smaller minority underfoot.

No, the entire idea called anarchy is all about not needing a government because people should be getting along without it. So the problem with anarchy as a way of life is that you must not come up with the urge to kill people.

>>>OK so maybe a lot of other people who actually think for themselves can too, but the majority is still ruled by instinct!

(1) Too bad. (2) I think you underestimate your fellow human beings. The U.S. lived on the edge-of-anarchy (minimal government) from 1789 to 1900 and almost everyone survived just fine. People took care of themselves and enjoyed being free of parental interference by the politicians.

Now we have a nanny state, and it seems you can't do anything without government interferenc

>>>voting for people who can keep me in a job, keep inflation low, keep me and my family safe and prospering in the future.

What you're looking for is not "politicians" but "parents", and since I presume you are not a child, my advice is that you need to "put away your childish things" and stand on your own two feet as an adult. The purpose of the government is not to babysit you and/or raid your neighbors wallets like Daddy Soprano & give you their money (which I call theft of labor). The purpose of government, to quote the founder of the Democratic Party, is to "prevent one man from harming another. And that is all the government should interfere." - Thomas Jefferson.

Another person, not sure who, said "A government powerful enough to give everything you need is also powerful enough to take everything you have. Including your property, your liberty, or your life." Just ask the American citizens who President FDR forced into concentration camps. FDR had become so powerful, he was able to imprison millions of Americans with just a word from his lips, like a living reincarnation of the Roman Emperor and completely contrary to the Supreme Law of the Land.

The bigger the government becomes, the smaller your liberty becomes, until you might as well be living like a child, who must constantly ask permission. I don't want to live in such a society.

Just ask the American citizens who President FDR forced into concentration camps. FDR had become so powerful, he was able to imprison millions of Americans with just a word from his lips, like a living reincarnation of the Roman Emperor and completely contrary to the Supreme Law of the Land.

1. Without regulation, monopolies will eventually form and once at the top they will leverage their position to increase barriers to market entry. They will also manually set arbitrary prices and wages and therefore be no better than communism.

2. Humans won't wait 10 years through an economic depression. They'll either turn to crime because they feel that society in general screwed them or they'll join or vote for radical political alignments in order to push change. You can chast

1. When monopolies form, they do not last. Either new companies emerge to offer lower prices than the monopoly's prices, or new technologies emerge to break the monopoly (CDs replaced by downloadable songs, for example), or both at the same time. You mentioned Standard Oil... well that held a monopoly for maybe ten years, but then the monopoly eroded due to new companies emerging in Texas and the monopoly was broken. There was no need for government interference.

Don't do crime, don't get your freedoms limited. Life isn't as hard as you're pretending it is. Follow the law or change the law, but in the end it is important to know that a repercussion for a convicted criminal is not the same as limiting freedoms.

When the mere act of sharing a NSL Letter with my lawyer is treated as a crime, when the mere act of having a FlashMob party with my friends at the local Pub becomes a crime, when the mere act of refusing to pay taxes on blank CD/DVDs AND paying a fine to local RIAA for downloading music to my PC becomes a crime, when the congressmen and MPs who were elected by me refuse to listen to me and instead obey the diktats of Moneybags and pass an act that makes it a crime to high-five my friends at school, when t

You pretend to care enough, but you don't. If you did you would do something about this supposed corrupt activity and revolt. Instead you'll sit back and be pacified by all the good things your government does for you and wait for someone else to throw the first stone.

Get real, get reality. Do crime, you get convicted and deal with the consequences. If you want the laws changed, quit crying to me about it and actually go do something about it. You're the guy upset about the way laws incriminate --- its

Enoguh with your tired propaganda. Sharing is not a crime. Destroying the internet for the benefit of coke snorting, whore fucking, disgusting music industry execs ought to be one.

Cry a river. It won't change shit about THE LAW. And until you man up and do something to actually change those laws, you'll get charged and convicted for what your opinion disagrees with. NAMBLA has an opinion too, but I hope they won't start making love to young boys until they get our country to accept their ideas.

I'm not talking propaganda, I'm talking about reality. I am totally happy with banning people who do crime on the internet from using the internet over a 3-strikes 'graduated response'. If

We're changing the law right here. That's what we are doing with the fine people at LQDN. In any case, I'm more than capable of doing whatever it takes not to be disconnected, me and all my high end pirated software.

Yes, I admit it, all my software is PIRATED. I downloaded it for free on the internet! Sue me! I can even give you the name and addresses of the copyright holders, even better, I'm going to GIVE YOU copies of ALL my software. For free. Oh my god I'm such a thief. Surely the makers of that softwa

Be a good boy and man up to your words. ACTUALLY do something instead of sitting on slashdot pretending like your complaints will make a difference.

My guess is that you are actually too satisfied by the other good things your government provides and that you would rather enjoy that stability than do what is necessary to achieve your proposed goals. I'll be watching the news, waiting for ninnies like you to man up and do something about all this hustling and bustling you

My MP reused one of my argument in the assembly, another, and he, along with the few main opponents, thanked us for our contributions; in fact they all met [I couldn't attend due to a last minute obligation] with the few MPs in a bar after the surprise vote of the 9th

I sure hope child porn and spammers get banned from access.

And I want cancer to be cured. I'm going to get a law passed to make cancer illegal. It's gonna be as useful as what you're defending here.

I guess we'll see if you actually get ignored or not based on the outcome.

Its a shame that you've so recklessly implied laws do not have meaningful outcomes. I'm sure the child pornographers and spammers that have already been busted, to-date, would disagree with your blatant misrepresentation of reality. If you felt that laws do not actually serve such purpose, what are you so upset about? Aren't you, according to your implication, immune to recourse for your actions?

Your argument has some weight, but has nothing to do with the fact that this article is a completely wrong and misrepresents what net neutrality actually is.

Do crime on the net, get banned. Its the same way in the real world. If you want the laws changed so you're not a criminal anymore, do it the right way by revolution or amendment --- talking shit on slashdot and conveniently pretending that laws don't exist won't get you anything but convicted and banned in the end.

It's quite clear to me that the end of the Golden Age of the Internet is drawing near.

The internet has finally drawn the attention of the huge money and power brokers of the world. These people are going to make sure that the Internet serves their ends as much as possible.

Oh, there will be the few geeks who know how to set up a proxy to secure a tiny bit of anonymity until one of the Big Fish get wind of you and get interested in tracking you down, but for the most part, all connections are going to be monitored. They are going to know who's on each end of every communication channel, and they are going to know what is being communicated, and to a large extent, they will control it. Whether it's priority transmission speeds, bandwidth capping, or outright censoring, there's too much money at stake on the Internet now to leave the playing field "neutral".

Oh do piss off. All of this is only being brought in because a minority of internet users are incapable of controlling themselves. Fuck em. When you've 10% of an ISP's users using 90% of the traffic, mostly for illegal purposes, then something needs to be done for the benefit of the 90% who are able to exercise restraint.

Correct. Like "per gigabyte" pricing. It seems entirely logical that grandma should only pay $7 a month for her minimal usage, while I pay $100 a month for my heavy downloading. I'm using more electricity therefore I'm costing the ISP more money. It's only natural that I should pay more overall.

Of course, if I did have to pay $100 that means I'd download less, probably moving to smaller files like 150 megabytes instead of the 1.5 gig HD videos. So it's a reinforcing paradigm where higher prices encoura

They'd have more to lose in a system like this. Their costs for operation remain pretty much the same from month to month (just maintaining a network that already exists), but they could lose a whole lot of money just because people didn't feel like downloading the latest youtube sensation. Not only that but peak times would pretty much remain peak times and any "bottlenecks" would still get bumped into. They'll continue to set policies that affect the top 10% (many of whom are taking advantage of the sy

That's true, but most companies don't charge for tech support. If for example I started calling my electric company for hours on end, and asking for assistance converting my bulbs to compact fluorescent lights, they would not assess me a fee. They'd keep charging me the same 8 cents per kilowatthour they've always charged, and consider the tech support as part of their "cost of doing business". i.e. Good customer service.

So they put in optics to increase throughput. So what? Someone still needs to pay for the servers, the routers, the switches, the electricity to run it all, the buildings the equipment is housed in. A router or switch can only transmit so much data per port, it's not infinite. A server can only serve so much data per second.

You think Google is going to put up long with some idiot provider charging customers an extra $20/month to allow access to *.google.com/*You think Google is going to share it's ad revenue with consumer ISPs? I'm just using Google as an example, but multiply this by all the big businesses out there.

Time Warner, Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, etc are all competing with each other using different technologies. Within the next 5 years or so you'll have fiber-class wireless connections available to your homes.

You really think every single player is going to be able to pull their head out of their butts long enough to coordinate something as complex as tiered internet?

Competition is going to keep net neutrality a reality until the basics fundamentally change. You may have the odd player who tries to nickel and dime their customers by over regulating their networks, but it'll be the minority, and there will be options.

Oh no, the big bad moneymen are here to they'll rape and pillage our Internet and there's nothing we can do to stop them. The end is near! Boo-hoo. If you don't like the way the wind is blowing, stand up and fight against it you fucking pussy. You're not helpless so stop acting like you are.

That probably sounds like a troll but I'm so sick of hearing the defeatist attitude of people who could actually prevent these things if they stopped whining about them for five minutes and stood up for their supposed be

Oh, there will be the few geeks who know how to set up a proxy to secure a tiny bit of anonymity until one of the Big Fish get wind of you and get interested in tracking you down, but for the most part, all connections are going to be monitored. They are going to know who's on each end of every communication channel, and they are going to know what is being communicated, and to a large extent, they will control it.

I suspect if it becomes a large problem for a large set of people, then people will start encr

Most of the people I know are not familiar with the intricacies of today's technology. If they think for one minute they are being monitored, watched and spied upon by anyone, let alone government and telecoms companies, they'll stop internet shopping, social networking and wikipedia surfing immediately (which lets face it, is all most normal people use a PC for nowadays anyway). Just look at how much people kicked off over Facebook wanting to protect people's email inbox after the sender deleted their copy...

If this even get close to being passed, mainstream media will have a field day, especially given that most UK tabloids despise Europe in its entirety already.

Could somebody point me to the relevant bits? I read through the text, but I can't seem to find where it says anything about three strikes or mandatory web filtering (as claimed by the Blackout Europe campaign), other than the basic idea that the end user must be advised of any traffic control policies.

I live in the UK and it's well beyond threat. Carter (and I wont refer to him by his full title of Lord because he's undeserving of it) has already given the green light for companies to do whatever the fuck they want and totally disregard net neutrality despite OFCOM previously announcing that they would protect it.

I guess it depends where you are in Europe, but certainly in the UK the Labour government has already outright written off the idea of net neutrality.

It's about your ISP being told to kick you off the net after being caught using it for illegal activity 3 times. You know, just like most ISPs do in the UK already, with some kicking you the first time.